Lead Applied Scientist: AI-Driven Healthcare Decisions

Humana, Inc.; Phoenix (AZ); Hybrid; USD 129,000 - 178,000; Full time

Job summary

Humana, Inc. seeks a Lead Applied Scientist to design and scale intelligent decision systems powering our Next Best Action platform. You will own models from prototyping to production and collaborate with engineers to ensure scalable, observable systems.

The role requires strong ML/QC expertise, Python, and experience with production ML platforms. Remote/hybrid work is available with occasional travel to Humana offices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field; strong mathematical foundation.
• 6+ years of professional experience in machine learning, applied science, or related engineering disciplines.
• Experience designing, deploying, and monitoring ML solutions in production.
• Strong understanding of reinforcement learning and sequential decision making.
• Experience with distribution and scalable ML platforms such as Databricks and PySpark.
• Demonstrated ability to translate business problems into analytical models and production solutions.
• Experience owning models across the full lifecycle from prototyping to monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and improve ML and RL models for personalized recommendations, sequential decision making, and policy learning.
• Apply decision science, operations research, and simulation techniques to formulate complex decision problems and improve outcomes.
• Develop and improve production ML pipelines using Python, PyTorch, Databricks, PySpark, Ray RLlib, and MLflow.
• Design experiments, simulations, offline evaluations, and metrics to assess model effectiveness and business impact.
• Own models and decision policies through prototyping, testing, deployment, production monitoring and iteration.
• Collaborate with software engineering and platform teams to ensure scalable, reliable, and observable systems.
• Incorporate clinical eligibility, member preferences, business rules, and constraint handling into decision systems.
• Provide technical leadership on model architecture, algorithm selection, evaluation methods, and system design.

Skills

Python programming

ML frameworks

Distributed data processing

Software engineering fundamentals

Model lifecycle ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Databricks

PySpark

Ray RLlib

MLflow

Job description

Humana, Inc. seeks a Lead Applied Scientist to design and scale intelligent decision systems powering our Next Best Action platform. You will own models from prototyping to production and collaborate with engineers to ensure scalable, observable systems.

The role requires strong ML/QC expertise, Python, and experience with production ML platforms. Remote/hybrid work is available with occasional travel to Humana offices.